Soured vs unsoured question

[amfukuda]

I'm going to brew a Guinness clone and I keep reading about souring a couple bottles of stout and dumping it in the bottling bucket. My question is this really necessary. By hat I mean can you taste a big difference in the end or not. Any advice or thoughts would be great

 

[eastoak]

way back in ye olden days publicans would blend older sour beer with fresh beer but i'm not sure that has anything to do with guinness stout today.

 

[daksin]

Guinness is made by blending a portion of soured stout back into the beer, but that's not a process we can reliably recreate as homebrewers. Some recipes use some acidulated malt to get some of that lactic twang back into the beer, and there's at least one on here that attempts to mimic the souring without blending. I have tried a few times to re-find that recipe, but I can't seem to find it. If anybody else knows what I'm talking about, they should post it up here.

 

[eastoak]

found on some random website.

Q: Someone told me that Guinness intentionally added sour Guinness to their beers. Is that true?

A: Yes, part of the process is to blend in some specially soured Guinness. The following was extracted from the Homebrew Digest. I believe the original author was Martin Lodahl, but I may be mistaken: "...they have a series of huge oaken tuns dating back to the days before Arthur Guinness bought the brewery, which they still use as fermentors for a fraction of the beer. The tuns have an endemic population of Brettanomyces, lactic acid bacteria and Lord knows what else, and beer fermented in it sours emphatically. They pasteurize this and blend small quantities of it with beer fermented in more modern vessels."

 

[eric19312]

found on some random website.

They pasteurize this and blend small quantities of it with beer fermented in more modern vessels."

Key piece of information is that they pasteurize it before adding back. That would kill the souring bugs/yeasts and prevent them from souring the entire batch.

You could perhaps brew a batch of an intentionally soured stout...perhaps the Tart of Darkness clone and and try adding a couple bottles to a regular stout. Just make sure to heat the soured beer to about 170-180F for a few minutes before adding to the bottling bucket. Maybe cook it with your priming sugar would work.